The Europe without borders discourse and splitting European identities

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to trace and scrutinize some of the underlying forces that might contribute to explaining the current skepticism about a policy of debordering Europe. The author therefore discusses why prefiguring a borderless Europe based on European identity has stumbled into misconceived conceptions of the nation, and then presents an explanation of the transformative dynamics that undermine the vision of a borderless Europe. The paper concludes that a borderless Europe will remain a vision as long as the idea of a European identity cannot establish a reliable alternative to its national counterpart, but multiple cosmopolitan forces still keep pushing towards debordering Europe.